Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

This week I added 1962 Kahn’s Wieners football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 38 cards in this set: sixteen Browns, fourteen Steelers, and a sprinkling of players from six other teams. Kahn’s Meats was (and still is) based in Cincinnati, and the early Kahn’s sets were heavily weighted toward players from nearby Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

The 1962 Kahn’s set includes a pre-rookie card of Gene Hickerson, pictured here. Hickerson’s generally recognized rookie card (because it was issued by a major card company) is in the 1966 Philadelphia set. (For a discussion about rookie cards and pre-rookie cards, see an earlier article, R is for Rookie Cards.)

According to beckett.com, Kahn’s also issued an album to hold their 1962 cards, but I have not seen one yet.

Thanks again to Mike Ford, who provided images for several of the Kahn’s sets.

As I reported earlier, a few weeks ago I bought a set of 1972 Sunoco Stamps, and now I’m scanning them for the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Yesterday I did the Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Browns. As I’ve said, overall, I’m not fond of the images used in the set. The stamps are small, and because the images are mostly action shots, you can’t see much of the players.

When scanning the Browns cards, though, I noticed that several of the action shots pictured the Browns in a mud game. Now these I like! I love watching weather games, be they in snow, rain, mud, or wind. For one thing, I prefer defensive battles to offensive shows, and bad weather slows the offenses down. For another, it’s just fun to see guys flopping around in the mud. To me, the weather is part of the game, and playing in a dome is playing something short of real football. I’ll take a mud game in Cleveland or a snow game in Buffalo over a dome game anytime.